Editor's note: In 2014, Montana celebrates 150 years as a territory and 125 years as a state. We're marking both landmark birthdays each Sunday with a Montana Moment, a chronological look at key events in Montana's history.

The moment: Great Falls plays critical role in "Operation Vittles," the largest and longest-running humanitarian airlift operation in history, June 1948 through September 1949.

The story: The idea was outlandish. The recent victors of World War II would expend super-human effort to feed the starving, recently defeated capitol of a nation that had unleashed horrific war and mass slaughter upon the world. Already making do with little, the people of the half-city under siege would hold out against the Soviet forces surrounding them and ignore their offers of food and reunion with their neighbors.

The sensational story of the Berlin Airlift of 1948 began as the Soviet Union blockaded all land routes supplying the 2.5 million people in the section of Berlin claimed by Great Britain, France and the United States at the end of World War II. East German and East Berlin were held by the Soviet Union.

The military of the democracies was outnumbered 62 to 1 in Berlin, according to "Candy Bombers" by Andrei Cherny. And the stakes were high: Without the air lift, NATO would never have existed, the Marshall Plan would have failed, the Iron Curtain likely would have descended over France, Italy and the rest of Germany.

"It would be the testing place that would determine whether the Soviets could conquer the rest of Europe or whether democracy could hold its ground; whether there would be a hot war or a cold peace," Cherny wrote.

With land routes blocked, the fledgling U.S. Air Force took on the job of supplying the city. For the next 462 days, American airmen and their allies delivered more than 2.3 million tons of cargo, with a plane landing every three minutes. Americans logged 600,000 hours of flight time, covering 92 million miles, with the loss of 31 American lives. Mechanics worked around the clock.

Great Falls' air base was vital in what became the first victory of the Cold War and a humanitarian effort that turned enemies into allies.

Great Falls was selected for the training site for the flying missions because the magnetic course flown into Great Falls was the same as that on the Rhine-Main to Templehof corridor.

The crews consisted of a pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer. They were able to train under similar conditions here, duplicated to the last detail. Weather conditions were similar to those in Berlin during the winter.

Classroom training was said to be state of the art. All of the C-54 systems: fuel, hydraulic, electrical, heating, and flight, were detailed in full-size training aids. All ground crew personnel were enlisted personnel. The preparation was backed up with aircraft flying approaches with full weight loads up to 70,000 pounds. Most of the crews who trained at Great Falls were former bomber pilots who had not flown transports but had multi-engine experience.

Each of the students received 133 hours of training during the 21-day assignment here. Of this, 20 hours was flight training, with each pilot making at least three landings under instrument conditions with maximum weight load.

Following training, the crews would go to one of the air depots to get an aircraft to fly to Germany. Ironically, the need for pilots was so great that many of the former bomber pilots found themselves flying the same routes to Berlin that they flew during the war, less than four years earlier. But during the airlift the cargo was coal, flour or food.

Great Falls also had another connection in Orloff Potter Morrow, who died here in May. He was a controller at Templehof airfield in Berlin during the airlift, when the airport was the busiest in the world.

Live the moment: Read the gripping story of the airlift in "The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour Paperback" by Andrei Cherny. For children, the chapter book "Candy Bomber" by Michael O. Tunnell is recommended, along with the charming picture book "Mercedes and the Chocolate Pilot" by Margot Theis Raven.